Starting on this technological journey

Hello there, my name is Lucy and I’m a small, redheaded female, who can run her mouth a bit, but hey, this height makes it difficult to be noticed…the hair…not so much.

So, I’ve just enrolled on this crazy uni course where we draw all sorts of stuff and turn it into a 3D world. Pretty cool huh? This is the epiphany of escapism, which I’ve found myself doing quite a lot in recent years. So, I’m a girl, who likes games. That’s right, it seems us girls like blood and violence just as much as you meat eating males. I think this comes from growing up with an older brother, who in all honesty, only let me ‘watch’ whenever a game was in the vicinity. I’m not the most skilled in the technology department, as I still have a Nokia 5310 Xpress Music phone, but that doesn’t mean to say I’ve only watched games. I’ve played a few, but they don’t consume my life, I own a Nintendo wii…enough said.

My very first love of the game world though, came from watching my brother. It’s probably the earliest, yet most vivid memories of a game I think I have. This game, in my opinion, was far too complex and pushed the boundaries for the technology to handle at the time and yet it still blew me away. This was the one and only Final Fantasy 7. Yes, one of those crazy FF fans, but only for FF7 if I’m perfectly honest. Sure I may have dabbled in completing FF10, but let’s not go into that shall we. The main thing I noticed about number 7 though, was its incredible ability to consume you into the world on the TV screen, with these blocky characters who didn’t have voices but this still didn’t stop me from feeling like I knew these characters. I was right there, gripped from start to finish. As much as I love the story characters, even the music, I don’t think I could ever play it myself. I’d shatter the illusion my brother created when I watched him play. It’s a story to me and not something to get stuck on, or stress about. The story is so complex yet beautiful.

This was the game that has become my main inspiration and the source of my love for games. I’ve always had a knack for art. I truly began to love art and enjoy being creative, during year nine of high school. A crucial year where you decide on your GCSE’s (doesn’t seem so crucial now I’m doing a degree in all honesty) It was here where I met my first ever hero. My art teacher, Mrs Sanky. She was a true inspiration and filled me with so much confidence in my work. I was a shy, timid little thing and she was a rebellious ex punk artist who fancied bold men with beer bellies and chest hair, but I’m going off topic. What I’m trying to say is, she was like a second mum. A cool, artistic mum, who always just let me do my thing and praised me when I finished. She suggested I look at going to Leeds College of Art to do a National Diploma in Art and Design. After an interview and an A* grade in GCSE Art, I enrolled and for the next 2 years I struggled to decide on what to do. During school, I designed countless characters and even a story for a game (next instalment of the Final Fantasy series to be precise) I love the idea of creating a world and characters for people to get lost and fall in love with. During college however, I kind of forgot that.

After the first year, I specialised in graphic design, and hated it. When the idea of university came about, I rediscovered my love of game design and decided to look at a bunch of courses related to the subject. Being the first person in my family to go to uni, I felt like it was the right thing for me to be doing. I happened to stumble across a place called De Montfort University, and after an open day then interview, the letter came through the door and I’m now sat here, in a room twice the size as the room I grew up in, writing a blog about how I ended up here. Sounds quite dull now that I read it back. But hey, I’ve made some great friends already and am really looking forward to loosing myself  in this course, to get me into a career, that I’m willing to get out of bed for; because after working as a waitress for a year, I know damn well, that the mundane ‘normal job’ just isn’t for me. Give me dragons and zombies any day of the week.